HIV Symptoms – Early Symptoms of HIV

For all of you searching the internet out there looking for early symptoms of HIV and getting extremely worried please stop!

Take a deep breath and calm down. By now you would have read multiple sites providing a laundry list of ‘HIV Symptoms’ and I’m sure you are suffering from some if not most of them.

Take another deep beath and let it our slowly slowly slowly. Feel better? Good.
Now let’s analyze the situation logically.

Just like most of my patients, you are asking ‘what are the symptoms of HIV?’

What you really want to know is ‘do I have HIV or not?’
And you are looking for symptoms to help you answer this question.

What you really want to know is ‘do I have HIV or not?’

Please understand that this is an extremely unhelpful question to ask simply because it is absolutely impossible to tell if someone has HIV or not based on sero-conversion symptoms or lack thereof.

Let’s look at 2 very well established facts:

1. Not all patients who are infected with HIV will develop sero-conversion symptoms
2. Sero-conversion symptoms are extremely non-specific. In other words, the same symptoms can be caused by multiple other illnesses and diseases.

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is it does not matter if a person has symptoms or not. A complete absence of symptoms does not mean a person is not infected with HIV. Similarly, having every symptom on the laundry list does not mean a person has HIV.

Looking for HIV symptoms serves one purpose and one purpose only. And that is to get yourself worried and anxious.
Furthermore, anxiety can actually cause some of the so-called ‘HIV Symptoms’. You can obviously see how this leads to a downward spiral.

So please do yourself a favor. Stop looking for symptoms. You are just going to scare yourself silly and have a nervous breakdown.

Focus on what you have to do. Talk to your doctor about getting PEP if your exposure was less than 72 hours ago. Or talk to your doctor about HIV testing. There is lots of information in this site with regards to different HIV tests available for different exposure times.

875 Comments

Halo doctor, I had sex with a lady but her fluids entered my open wound, I went for test after six weeks because I was feeling sick then, the first rapid test came out positive and I was told to wait for confirmation, I did the confirmation 20 minutes later and it can out negative, after another 30 mins I did another one ir came out negative also. And I was refered to a bigger government hospital for general test and all the test including hiv came out negative I was only told to be doing more exercise and reduce my intake of red meat, because I have high acidic something like that. After another six weeks I went to do another test and it came out negative. I don’t really have symptoms of hiv, no fever, no rashes, no enlarge lymph nodes and so on, just having itchy and dry troath that has lasted for more than three months now..I’m still scared and I don’t know what to do again.

It is very common to get false positive HIV tests. It seems that your doctors have done a very good job in conducting the right confirmatory tests all of which were fortunately negative. I really do not see what you have to be worried about. If you really need more peace of mind you may want to discuss with your doctors to do the HIV RNA PCR test.

Hi doc . Its been 6 weeks since i had sex with an escort. I did had condom on the whole time. But im still worry . Could i still get any disease? I do feel itching in on my penis sometimes. Please let me know thank you doc

Of course you can. This may come as a surprise to you but it is a fact that condoms are NOT 100% effective. In other words, condoms REDUCE the risk of HIV and STDs. Condoms DO NOT ELIMINATE the risk of HIV and STDs.

I had protected sex and unprotected oral sex with my girlfriend whom i realised after a week that she is sleeping around with other two guys. Its been 25 days since we had sex. I felt burning two to three days but it has disappeared, now i have joint pains, headaches, sore throat and my eyes every morning feels like they are dry. But i have no fever. Am worried doc are these signs of hiv